The Quickening of Tom Turnpike Read online

  The Quickening of

  Tom Turnpike

  Talltrees vol. 1

  W.E.Mann

  prologue

  The screaming was coming from every direction by now, savage shrieks of freakish agony and wails of devastation rising above the crackling flames and punctuated by ringing gunfire. Their strategy was brutal in its simplicity: Torch the homes and wait for the families to come scrambling out; kill those that resisted.

  She stopped and took him urgently by the shoulders. The fire danced in her eyes.

  “You must go. Help Edmund,” she shouted over the din. “I’ll take them the rest of the way.”

  He was torn. “I can’t let you go alone.”

  Another gunshot rang out with the shattering of glass. She looked over his shoulder into the pandemonium as distraught terror howled from a burning hut nearby.

  “You must. They need you. Go now.” She pushed his chest and took the children by their hands. “We are nearly there.”

  He took two steps back, his expression of despair hardening to one of military resolve.

  “Go straight there as fast as you can,” he shouted. “For Heaven’s sake, stop for nothing.”

  He paused to look at her, to soak her up, imprint her in his mind. Then turned and ran towards the flames.

  one

  My heart was thumping, but I didn’t dare to breathe. How on Earth had I ended up down here, hidden among the coffins, with the most terrifying man I had ever met coming after me? Why did I listen to Freddie? Why do I always listen to Freddie? No good ever comes of it, and this time it would be worse than ever.

  Colonel Barrington was a member of the Nazi party. He was an informant. I knew that. My mother had warned me about him before I had even started at the school. That was almost three years ago now, but it had stuck in my memory. Never say anything bad about the Party, she had told me, keep your deepest thoughts to yourself, and never disobey Colonel Barrington, Mr. Wilbraham or Doctor Saracen. They were all members of the Party even before Britain lost the War. And they were all informants, dangerous men who could ensure that people they don’t like are never seen again. I was all she had left, she had said, and she couldn’t bear it if I was sent away to Behavioural School. Boys sent to Behavioural School never come back.

  My poor mother.

  I could hear his footsteps now, approaching the Dungeon door. He was sure to find us. All he had to do was look. Oh why did I follow Freddie? How did I end up in this awful situation?

  I stared blindly into the carnivorous void.

  My poor, poor mother.

  It had all started at lunch the day before.

  ***

  “You want ghost-stories? I know all of them. I know what you can hear in the corridors at night. I know about the Wandering Monk, the Fallen Boy and the Blizzard of Glass. I know what drives the teachers insane.”

  The First Formers were captivated. Freddie had a real talent for ghost-stories. He told them with such morbid, lip-licking enthusiasm that you couldn’t help believing everything he said.

  “You’ve heard about the Deathly Screamer, haven’t you?” He asked, eyes glinting darkly. “No? The boy who fell from the top of the Spiral Staircase?”

  Not one of the First Formers moved, already under Freddie’s spell.

  “It was his birthday, you see, the twenty-ninth of February, and he was incredibly excited because most years there is no twenty-ninth of February. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d been sent a birthday card. In fact, maybe he’d never been sent a birthday card in his whole life. Imagine that!

  He put his dressing-gown and slippers on before he got into bed that night, the night of the twenty-eighth, so as not to waste any time in the morning. And he was so excited that he couldn’t sleep all night. He just lay there in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the wake-up bell to ring. He waited and he waited and he waited, listening to the ticking of his alarm-clock. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock...” Freddie’s speech became slower and quieter. The First Formers leant in with their elbows on the table and their faces cradled in their hands, wide-eyed with stupefied anticipation. “He waited so long that during the darkest hours of the night he started thinking that his birthday was just a cruel myth invented by his mother, that tomorrow would never come and he would be imprisoned in that night forever, with the rest of the world sleeping soundly.

  But finally the wake-up bell went and he sprang out of bed like a jack-in-the-box and out of his dorm as fast as he could to get to...”

  “Which dorm was he in?” blurted one of the enthralled First Formers, unable to stifle the interruption.

  “I heard he was in Red,” said another.

  “No. It was Wolfhall,” asserted a third, with the agreement of a couple of his friends.

  “Well,” replied Freddie, “you are all wrong. It was Marlborough. And perhaps next time you should raise your hand if you have a question.” He paused to remember where he was. “So, as I was saying, he ran out of Marlborough to go downstairs and check the post. But, when he got to the top of the Spiral Staircase, he decided it would be much quicker to get to the bottom if he slid all the way down the banister.

  Anyway, you can just imagine what happened next. As he got onto the banister and started sliding down, his dressing-gown cord got caught up in the railings. He tried desperately to release it, tugging and tugging. But he toppled over the edge and dangled there for ages, screaming like a lunatic for someone, anyone to save him. The cord began to fray. One thread at a time. And with each thread breaking, he was one inch closer to his horrible death. Just imagine: Knowing exactly how gruesomely horrid your death is going to be and not being able to do anything to stop it! Well one of the Masters arrived on the scene and ran down below him to try to grab him before he fell. But he was too late. The very last thread broke.

  I heard it took him literally five minutes to hit the stone floor at the bottom. He broke his back and all of his fingers, and there was so much blood that it gushed down the corridor and through to the Changing Rooms and turned all the white football shirts red.

  But the strangest thing of all was that his body was never found.” Freddie paused and eyed each First Former, ensuring that each one fully understood the horror of the situation, the fact that the mystery was still out there. Most other boys had finished their lunch and were filtering out of the Dining Room, voices echoing down the corridors, leaving a cavernous void of oak beams and ancient benches. Silence settled upon Freddie’s story. “He had landed right in the middle of the floor at the bottom of the Spiral Staircase with a Master looking straight down at him. But, by the time the Master rushed down to the bottom to see if he was still alive, the body had disappeared. Vanished into thin air. Nobody knows where it went. Some people say the Devil was waiting for him at the bottom and snatched him away as soon as he could. But I reckon he hit the floor so hard that he went right through it, like... like when you push a spoon into a jar of jam.”

  Some of the First Formers looked positively sick at this point, while some others looked longingly into the middle-distance, thinking about the last time they had tasted jam.

  “Which Master was it?” asked one of the smaller ones.

  “Nobody knows,” replied Freddie, “because all of the teachers swore that they wouldn’t tell anyone who it was”.

  “How long ago did this happen?” asked another.

  “Ages ago,” said Freddie. “Like ten or eleven years. Before the Occupation began, I think. If you listen carefully, some nights you can still hear his ghost screaming.”

  “That’s true,” said one of the wide-eyed First Formers. “My brother said that it used to keep him awake at night!”

/>   “Well,” said Freddie, “that’s why Turnpike and I are going to go down to the Dungeon at midnight tonight. We’re going to find the Deathly Screamer and tell him to keep the blasted noise down!”

  Well I had to agree to it. What choice did I have? I couldn’t very well decline in front of a group of First Formers who were already looking at me like a hero.

  So, it was with this stupid display of bravado that I found myself cornered into a midnight ghost-hunt. And it would set me upon a path far more grizzly and horrifying than any of Freddie’s most feverish imaginings.

  So, at midnight, when he shook me awake, why did I not simply disagree, roll over and go back to sleep?

  Well, this was Freddie Strange, the most persistent and wilful boy I’ve ever known. I should have realised that the fact that I didn’t disagree with his suggestion at lunchtime was, for him, as good as a contract signed in duplicate and witnessed by the Reichs Kommissar. And there was no doubt that we would get into trouble. None at all. Freddie was always getting into trouble. I think it was partly due to the fact that he simply had one of those mischievous faces; a mess of insolent freckles under a tangle of brown hair, and a constant smile-verging-on-a-smirk that always made teachers think he was plotting something devious. He may well poke fun at my regulation blond side-parting with Luftwaffe back and sides, but I’m sure it meant I spent fewer hours in detention.

  But, in spite of this, I followed Freddie in dressing-gown and slippers, crept out of our dorm long after Third Form Curfew, and padded down the corridor to the Main Hall in order to confront the ghost of a child who had fallen victim to a hideous twist of fate.

  In trustworthy daylight, the Main Hall was a palace of pillars, portraits and sculptures, overlooked from the First and Second Floors by majestic galleries. But looking down on it now, in the creaking night, it was a demonic haunt, it was Dracula’s castle. It was a place where every twitch, flutter and heartbeat spelt a frantic, gurgling death.

  The moon glared cruelly through the glass ceiling, creating a pandemonium of slanted shadows, darkening from mellow blue to nightmarish black towards the hall’s recesses so as to provide numerous hiding places for escaped murderers. Or worse.

  Blazing across the carpet below, and dramatically illuminated in the moonlight, was an enormous swastika. It was a mesmerising and terrifying design, which always put me in mind of the rotors of a combine harvester, hacking up everything that stands in its way. I still had the faint, precious memory of my father spitting in anger onto the swastika on the uniform of the soldier who came to take him away. But that was a long time ago.

  “Hurry up or we’ll get caught,” whispered Freddie nervously. “They’re just pictures. Just don’t look at their eyes.”

  I tried to tear my eyes away from one hideous crone in particular, her gorgon-hair writhing hypnotically, drawing me into her petrifying spell.

  Freddie grabbed my arm. “Come on. They can’t harm us unless we do something to upset them. Keep looking at the floor, and run.”

  We scampered around the First Floor gallery towards the Spiral Staircase, the central core of the school building, plunging from the Top Floor, past the dorms on the First and the classrooms and the Main Hall on the Ground, right down to the Basement.

  “Look,” whispered Freddie, catching his breath. “That’s where he fell from. Up there.” He was pointing with a glint of morbid intensity to the place one floor up where the banister began. “Look how far down it is!” Freddie really seemed to be enjoying this.

  “Oh come on, Freddie. You don’t really believe it, do you?” I asked, more out of hope than anything else. In daylight, I would have known that ghosts are just make-believe, but the shadows and the portraits had infected my mind and now I had absolutely no doubt: Ghosts do exist, and so do all of the other twisted creatures of horror. And they’re following us.

  My heart was thudding.

  “Look,” he said, peering over the banister through the netting. “You can see that the Basement floor is darker in the middle than it is at the edges. Still stained with his blood.”

  I tried to master my fear, think clearly. “That could be anything. And explain this,” I whispered. “Marlborough, in fact all the dorms are on this floor. If he was in such a hurry to get downstairs, why would he have gone up a floor before he...?”

  “Shh!” Freddie interrupted sharply. “There’s something there.”

  I froze, scarcely daring to breathe. I concentrated all of my efforts on listening for footfalls, worrying that I wouldn’t be able to hear anything over my pulse pounding my eardrums.

  Then I heard it too. A deep, menacing growl. I looked around frantically for the escape routes, but whatever it was had stopped growling and I had no idea where it had come from.

  Then we heard it again. More clearly this time. I realised with relief that it was a voice, a human voice. It sounded like Colonel Barrington, the Physics and Chemistry teacher, and it seemed to be coming from the direction of the Sick Bay, through the door to our right. The Colonel was not the teacher you would want catching you out of bed after lights-out. He was a tall humourless man with long, bony fingers, a strong smell of Brylcreem and eyes set so deeply that you could scarcely see his pupils. We could be sure that if we were caught, the next morning we would find ourselves facing Wilbraham, our grizzled, mammoth Headmaster, and the prospect of a caning.

  “Barrington!” whispered Freddie, looking puzzled. “What do you think he could be doing?”

  “How on Earth should I know?” I whispered tersely. “Maybe he’s talking to Head Matron about the sick boys.”

  “But she’s the only one who’s allowed up there. That’s the whole point: They’re being quarantined.”

  He was right. Barrington should not have been near the Sick Bay. For about two weeks, more and more boys had been coming down with illness. Wilbraham had explained to us at Assembly that there was a ‘flu epidemic and that Head Matron had received a Directive to quarantine any boys who displayed symptoms. The word “quarantine” put me in mind of rabid dogs. I didn’t like it. You always hear of people disappearing suddenly under suspicious circumstances and never being seen again, like the fathers of some of my classmates. Like my own father. But I knew I shouldn’t think like that. Schoolboys are surely too young for labour camps, aren’t we?

  Suddenly we heard footsteps. Freddie looked at me and I nodded urgently. And we ran, slippers slapping stone stairs, echoing all around. And just as we reached the bottom to sneak through the Basement door, we heard another door opening two floors above us.

  The temperature dropped sharply as we entered the Basement and, aside from the dank dripping of a pipe somewhere, there was silence. I became acutely aware that I was wearing a threadbare dressing-gown. But my unbidden shiver had nothing to do with the cold. The Basement was the sort of place where daylight certainties abandon you. If ghosts really do exist, then this must be their habitat.

  “He can’t have heard us,” said Freddie. “Come on, down there.”

  The Basement was the dark bowels of the school building. Down here was none of the tired grandeur of the three floors above us. It was a complex of huddled tunnels and exposed pipes and wiring. The storage rooms were down here, as well as the Changing Rooms, the Woodwork Room and the Gym.

  And, of course, the Dungeon.

  And down there to the left, looming heavy and ancient at the end of the passage, was the Dungeon door. It was a great, wooden door engraved with what had once been geometric designs or perhaps forgotten runic symbols, but had over the years been worn down to indistinct bumps and grooves. More importantly, as far as we were concerned, it had no lock, presumably because nobody of sound mind would ever want to enter.

  But we did.

  And during the next few days, when the whole world would turn inside-out, there would be many times when I would wish that we hadn’t.

  I had never been in the Dungeon before and had no idea what it contained or why it even existed if n
ot in order to give boys something of which to be afraid in the dead of night. Freddie had told the First Formers that the inside of the Dungeon was unique to each boy because each had different terrors in differing measures. For some, the place would be crawling with giant spiders or scorpions; for others, it was a dark labyrinth whose walls and ceilings were closing in, suffocating them or burying them alive.

  The door’s growling set my heart pounding at a dramatic rate. Freddie opened it just enough for us to squeeze through and, as it snarled shut behind us, we were immersed in cloying, impenetrable darkness. I gripped Freddie’s forearm instinctively to ensure that he had not been swallowed alive by the gloom. But neither of us spoke.

  Gradually my eyes adjusted slightly to the darkness, but enough for me see that we were in a cavernous tunnel with two further tunnels branching to the right, one just ahead of us and the other in the black distance.

  Suddenly something brushed against my ankle. I jumped with fright as whatever it was scurried away and disappeared. I finally mustered a quavering whisper. “Okay. So... we’re here now. Let’s go back. Even if his ghost is here, I don’t think we want to meet it. Look, you’re going to make up what we saw anyway, so we might just as well go to bed, get a good night’s sleep and you can tell people what you like in the morning.”

  Freddie gulped. “You’re not... scared, are you?” The atmosphere down here was bone-chilling.

  “Of course not,” I lied unconvincingly, knowing that he was just as scared as I was, and knowing that he was as unlikely as I was to admit it. “It’s just that, um... well we’ve got the Flucht tomorrow and... it’s getting very late.”

  Perhaps now I had given him an excuse to agree with me. That was what I hoped. The Flucht was the beginning of our military education. Every Third Former would be given a three minute headstart to dash out into the Forest before the Seniors came after us to bring us back to the school by whatever means necessary. It was the perfect opportunity for a Senior to settle any score he had with a Junior. By Tea, the corridors would be resonant with boys comparing grazes and bruises, and the Duty Matron would be busy with the less fortunate boys; those with broken ribs and noses.